The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1954)

It's an interesting thing about Hitchcock—where other directors saw light, he saw darkness. And I don't mean in terms of the stories he told, I mean in terms of the actors he chose.

When Americans looked at, say, Ingrid Bergman, they saw virginal purity, but Hitchcock saw a deeply conflicted woman, the one who would eventually run off with Roberto Rossellini. That he liked to tear the wings off Cary Grant and reveal the tortured Cockney kid underneath is a matter of record. Anthony Perkins was the all-American boy prior to Psycho. Why, even in Grace Kelly, an actress so beautiful a better looking one would make you go blind, he saw mostly spoiled petulance.

And while Jimmy Stewart had already revealed a dark side in Capra's It's A Wonderful Life and in all those Anthony Mann westerns, Hitchcock ramped it up in Rear Window to include obsession, misanthropy, voyeurism and impotence, ground they would explore again in Vertigo.

As an artist, I'd say Hitchcock was even a great judge of his own character—after all, Vertigo is largely a self-portrait of his own voyeuristic, controlling, misogynistic impulses—but as a man, he was unable to rein himself in and he eventually drove himself into the bridge abutment that was Tippi Hedren.

But then, I think an artist often see truths that the man himself doesn't.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Rear Window (prod. Alfred Hitchcock)
nominees: The Caine Mutiny (prod. Stanley Kramer); Creature From The Black Lagoon (prod. William Allard); Dial 'M' For Murder (prod. Alfred Hitchcock); The Far Country (prod. Aaron Rosenberg); Johnny Guitar (prod. Republic Pictures); On The Waterfront (prod. Sam Spiegel); 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (prod. Walt Disney)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: A Star Is Born (prod. Sidney Luft)
nominees: Hobson's Choice (prod. David Lean); Sabrina (prod. Billy Wilder); Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (prod. Jack Cummings)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai) (prod. Sôjirô Motoki)
nominees: Gojira (Godzilla) (prod. Tomoyuki Tanaka); Miyamoto Musashi (Samurai I: Miyamoto Musashi) (prod. Kazuo Takimura); Sanshô dayû (Sansho The Bailff) (prod. Masaichi Nagata); Senso (prod. Lux Film); La Strada (prod. Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti); Touchez pas au grisbi (prod. Robert Dorfmann)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Marlon Brando (On The Waterfront)
nominees: Humphrey Bogart (The Caine Mutiny and The Barefoot Contessa); Bing Crosby (The Country Girl); Kirk Douglas (20,000 Leagues Under The Sea); Ray Milland (Dial 'M' For Murder); Takashi Shimura (Shichinin no samurai a.k.a. Seven Samurai); James Stewart (The Far Country and Rear Window)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: James Mason (A Star Is Born)
nominees: Howard Keel (Seven Brides For Seven Brothers); Gene Kelly (Brigadoon); Charles Laughton (Hobson's Choice); John Mills (Hobson's Choice)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Grace Kelly (Dial 'M' For Murder, Rear Window and The Country Girl)
nominees: Shirley Booth (About Mrs. Leslie); Joan Crawford (Johnny Guitar); Ava Gardner (The Barefoot Contessa); Giulietta Masina (La Strada); Eleanor Parker (The Naked Jungle); Jane Wyman (Magnificent Obsession)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Judy Garland (A Star Is Born)
nominees: Brenda de Banzie (Hobson's Choice); Dorothy Dandridge (Carmen Jones); Doris Day (Young At Heart); Audrey Hepburn (Sabrina); Judy Holliday (It Should Happen to You); Jennifer Jones (Beat the Devil); Debbie Reynolds (Susan Slept Here)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Akira Kurosawa (Shichinin no samurai a.k.a. Seven Samurai)
nominees: Edward Dmytryk (The Caine Mutiny); Federico Fellini (La Strada); Alfred Hitchcock (Dial 'M' For Murder and Rear Window); Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront); Kenji Mizoguchi (Sanshô dayû a.k.a. Sansho the Bailiff); Nicholas Ray (Johnny Guitar)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: George Cukor (A Star Is Born)
nominees: Stanley Donen (Seven Brides For Seven Brothers); David Lean (Hobson's Choice); Billy Wilder (Sabrina)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Toshirô Mifune (Shichinin no samurai a.k.a. Seven Samurai)
nominees: Jack Carson (A Star Is Born); Lee J. Cobb (On the Waterfront); José Ferrer (The Caine Mutiny); Walter Hampden (Sabrina); Fred MacMurray (The Caine Mutiny); Karl Malden (On The Waterfront); Fredric March (Executive Suite); Edmond O'Brien (The Barefoot Contessa); Rod Steiger (On The Waterfront); John Williams (Dial M for Murder and Sabrina)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Eva Marie Saint (On the Waterfront)
nominees: Nina Foch (Executive Suite); Kyoko Kagawa (Sanshô dayû a.k.a. Sansho the Bailiff); Mercedes McCambridge (Johnny Guitar); Thelma Ritter (Rear Window); Kinuyo Tanaka (Sanshô dayû a.k.a. Sansho the Bailiff)

SCREENPLAY
winner: John Michael Hayes, from the short story by Cornell Woolrich (Rear Window)
nominees: Budd Schulberg (screenplay and story), suggested by articles by Malcolm Johnson (On The Waterfront); Billy Wilder, Samuel A. Taylor and Ernest Lehman, from the play "Sabrina Fair" by Samuel A. Taylor (Sabrina); Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni (Shichinin no samurai a.k.a. Seven Samurai)

SPECIAL AWARDS
"The Man That Got Away" (A Star Is Born) music by Harold Arlen; lyrics by Ira Gershwin (Song); John Meehan; Emile Kuri (20,000 Leagues Under The Sea) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Loren L. Ryder (Rear Window) (Sound)

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1951)

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that American lives have no second act, but Alec Guinness, being British, had three—first, as a comedic actor, then as a dramatic one, then as Obi Wan Kenobi.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: The African Queen (prod. Sam Spiegel)
nominees: Ace In The Hole (prod. Billy Wilder); The Day The Earth Stood Still (prod. Julian Blaustein); Detective Story (prod. William Wyler); A Place In The Sun (prod. George Stevens); The River (prod. Jean Renoir and Kenneth McEldowney); Scrooge (prod. Brian Desmond Hurst); Strangers on a Train (prod. Alfred Hitchcock); A Streetcar Named Desire (prod. Charles K. Feldman); The Thing From Another World (prod. Howard Hawks)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Lavender Hill Mob (prod. Michael Balcon)
nominees: Alice In Wonderland (prod. Walt Disney); An American In Paris (prod. Arthur Freed); The Man In The White Suit (prod. Michael Balcon)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Journal d'un curé de campagne (Diary Of A Country Priest) (prod. Union Générale Cinématographique)
nominees: Bakushû (Early Summer) (prod. Takeshi Yamamoto)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Marlon Brando (A Streetcar Named Desire)
nominees: Humphrey Bogart (The African Queen); Montgomery Clift (A Place In The Sun); Kirk Douglas (Ace In The Hole and Detective Story); Michael Rennie (The Day The Earth Stood Still); Alastair Sim (Scrooge)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Alec Guinness (The Lavender Hill Mob and The Man In The White Suit)
nominees: Fred Astaire (Royal Wedding); Cary Grant (People Will Talk); Gene Kelly (An American In Paris); Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (That's My Boy)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Vivien Leigh (A Streetcar Named Desire)
nominees: Anita Björk (Fröken Julie a.k.a. Miss Julie); Katharine Hepburn (The African Queen); Patricia Neal (The Day The Earth Stood Still); Eleanor Parker (Detective Story); Jan Sterling (Ace In The Hole)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Joan Greenwood (The Man in the White Suit)
nominees: Jeanne Crain (People Will Talk); Kathryn Grayson (Show Boat); Jane Powell (Royal Wedding)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Elia Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire)
nominees: Robert Bresson (Journal d'un curé de campagne a.k.a. Diary Of A Country Priest); Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train); John Huston (The African Queen); George Stevens (A Place in The Sun); Billy Wilder (Ace In The Hole); Robert Wise (The Day The Earth Stood Still)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Charles Crichton (The Lavender Hill Mob)
nominees: Alexander Mackendrick (The Man In The White Suit); Vincente Minnelli (An American in Paris)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Robert Walker (Strangers on a Train)
nominees: Porter Hall (Ace In The Hole); Oscar Levant (An American In Paris); Karl Malden (A Streetcar Named Desire); Vincent Price (His Kind of Woman); Peter Ustinov (Quo Vadis)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Kim Hunter (A Streetcar Named Desire)
nominees: Lee Grant (Detective Story); Thelma Ritter (The Mating Season); Elizabeth Taylor (A Place In The Sun); Shelley Winters (A Place In The Sun)

SCREENPLAY
winner: James Agee and John Huston, from the novel by C.S. Forester (The African Queen)
nominees: Billy Wilder, Lesser Samuels and Walter Newman (Ace In The Hole); Edmund H. North, from the story "Farewell to the Master" by Harry Bates (The Day The Earth Stood Still); T.E.B. Clarke (The Lavender Hill Mob); Raymond Chandler and Czenzi Ormonde, adaptation by Whitfield Cook, from the novel by Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train); Tennessee Williams, adaptation by Oscar Saul, from the play by Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire); Charles Lederer, from the short story "Who Goes There" by John W. Campbell, Jr. (The Thing From Another World)

SPECIAL AWARDS
Russell Harlan (The Thing From Another World) (Cinematography); Phil Brigandi and Clem Portman (The Thing From Another World) (Sound); Bernard Herrmann (The Day The Earth Stood Still) (Score)

Today's Oscar Trivia #3

Stolen from TCM's Now Playing magazine:

Four In One Thirteen times a single film has been nominated in all four acting categories. For which 1951 drama were the honors shared by Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden?

1929-1930 On November 5, 1930, the Academy held the third Oscar ceremony, covering the years 1929 and 1930, with sound films dominating for the first time. Which 1929 Best Picture nominee was a musical starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald?

Best Actress Of 1928-29, Part One: What Do We Mean By Best?

Of the three nominees for best actress of 1928-29, one of them, Marion Davies, is pretty much here just to round out the field. Which is not to say Davies didn't deserve the nomination. While she is mostly remembered now as the inspiration for no-talent opera singer Susan Alexander in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane—a grossly unfair characterization if that's what Welles really thought of her—Davies was actually a very talented comic actress and it shows in the silent comedy, Show People, for which I've nominated her. But the fact is, no matter how good Davies was, 1928-29 boils down to a race between two actresses, Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc and Lillian Gish in The Wind, who between them deliver not just the two best performances of the year, but two of the best performances of any year.

By now if you've been following this blog (a big "if," I'll grant you), you've heard of both Lillian Gish and Maria Falconetti. Gish, as you may recall, was my choice for the best actress of the Silent Era. She was D.W. Griffith's go-to actress for every great movie he ever made and then after his career faded, she carried on for another decade making nothing but top-notch films. The Wind is probably the finest performance of her award-winning career.

Falconetti, on the other hand, only made one movie of significance, The Passion of Joan of Arc, but, boy, what a movie. Pauline Kael, the influential albeit erratic critic for New Yorker magazine, said after Carl Dreyer's masterpiece was rediscovered in 1981 that Falconetti's performance "may be the finest performance ever recorded on film." Premiere magazine ranked it as the twenty-sixth best performance of all time in a list of the 100 greatest performances in film history, making it the highest ranked silent performance.

Choosing between them involves not so much a matter of knowing good from bad as knowing what it is in a performance that you value. And this is where I run into a problem: as a woman I once knew said to me twenty-five years ago, "You don't have any values."

True. But she of the Katie Awards, Katie- Bar-The- Door, and Mister Muleboy of the blog The Mouth O' The Mule are positively silly with values and fortunately for me, often have strongly held opinions even on issues they have no opinion about. They both agree that Lillian Gish was a great actress; where they disagree is on the issue of whether Maria Falconetti was an actress at all.

Two events in movie history permanently scarred Katie, Ali McGraw's Oscar nomination for Love Story and Anna Paquin's win for The Piano. Subsequent work firmly established in Katie's mind that neither can act a lick and that honors were bestowed on them in anticipation that they might one day prove to have talent and in recognition of the work of other people. In reaction, she's adopted an informal rule: "Never give someone an Oscar for their first performance."

Here, Maria Falconetti wasn't technically appearing in her first movie—the Internet Movie Database lists small roles in a pair of 1917 shorts—but she might as well have been. And while Katie agrees that The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of the greatest movies ever made and that Maria Falconetti is effective in it, she's convinced Falconetti's performance is a product not of any particular skill but of director Carl Dreyer's relentless bullying, Rudolph Maté's excellent camera work and Dreyer's and Marguerite Beaugé's patient work in the editing room.

Roger Ebert describes the effort that produced the performance this way: "Legends from the set tell of Dreyer forcing her to kneel painfully on stone and then wipe all expression from her face—so that the viewer would read suppressed or inner pain. He filmed the same shots again and again, hoping that in the editing room he could find exactly the right nuance in her facial expression."

Katie-Bar-the-Door thinks that given to what degree Dreyer hectored and humiliated her, and worked her to the point of exhaustion, it's no surprise that Falconetti convincingly comes across as hectored, humiliated and exhausted.

Consider too that since this is a silent film we're talking about, there are no line readings, which greatly complicate the actor's task, and because Dreyer shot the whole thing in a series of close-ups, there's very little need for Falconetti to play off the other actors. Dreyer simply put the camera on Falconetti and recorded everything and then assembled a character out of the footage.

Katie says that's not acting, it's something else—maybe a perfect face and a lot of film. I mean, if you put a stovepipe hat on your dog and took a hundred pictures of him, in one shot he's bound to look like Abraham Lincoln. But that doesn't make your dog the 16th president of the United States. (And no this is not my dog, who actually bears an uncanny resemblance to Woodrow Wilson.)

On the other hand, Mister Muleboy who is actually a trained actor in addition to being a highly intuitive blogger, points out that's "presumably the case in every feature film," that most screen performances consist of "a director badgering, sucking, pleading, or manipulating a 'performance' out of the actor. Usually manipulating it at the editing table. Crafting that 'great scene' from the (potentially nonsensical) multiple takes that, when combined, gave rise to that 'perfectly modulated, brilliant' performance. And that, in this director's/editor's medium, the idea of one acting performance that is in the control of the actor is—at best—only conjecture."

In fact, this is true of every per- formance, he says, even Marlon Brando in On The Water- front. Trying to identify where the work of the director and editor and cinematographer leave off and the work of the actor begins is like trying to identify the individual ingredients in a baked cake and then hand out an award to the sugar and the butter.

Hmm. So who's right?

Oh, wait. Katie-Bar-The-Door just reminded me that I'm married to her which pretty much means that even if she's wrong, she's right. But I don't think she's wrong. You know?

Also she says it's recycling day and can I please put out the newspapers? Gotta go.

To read Part Two, click here.